The initial article can be found here:

https://paulvillegas.substack.com/p/a-refutation-of-rothbardian-and-hoppean

Rebuttal to "A Refutation of Rothbardian and Hoppean Critiques of F.A. Hayek" by Paul Villegas
The Hayekian Error: From Evolutionary Order to Ethical Evasion

by Juan Fernando Carpio

Where Mises rooted praxeology in the axiom of action and self-ownership, Hayek traded moral rigor for epistemic modesty, equating cultural endurance with ethical validity. Such compromise leaves us prey to the State, stripping the right to exit or refuse. This essay charts the defection—from prices as mere signals to valuations of responsibility, from blind evolution to rational imperative—fusing Rothbard’s natural law with Hoppe’s argumentation ethics into one unyielding framework.

I. From Evolutionary Order to Ethical Evasion

Friedrich Hayek stands as one of the great paradoxes of twentieth-century liberal thought. He is celebrated for rescuing the idea of spontaneous order from the rubble of central planning, yet his own philosophical premises undercut the moral foundations of the freedom he praised. His admirers present him as the cautious empiricist who saved liberalism from the rationalist excesses of natural law. But caution is not a virtue when it drains liberty of justification. Hayek’s self-imposed agnosticism about moral truth left him incapable of defending individual rights as anything more than the unintended consequences of social evolution.

The problem is not that Hayek described the process of institutional evolution inaccurately. The problem is that he mistook description for defense. The fact that moral rules “evolve” tells us nothing about whether they are just. Conventions, customs, and entire civilizations have evolved on foundations of conquest, serfdom, and coercion. Survival in history has never been proof of justice. Yet Hayek treats survival—cultural adaptation—as if it were a kind of moral test. Rules that persist must, in some pragmatic sense, be “good.” But by that standard, the most enduring despotisms would also be justified.

Rothbard and Hoppe reject that sleight of hand. For them, evolution can explain how people came to follow rules, but it cannot tell us why they ought to. The “is” of historical success never entails the “ought” of moral legitimacy. The only path from is to ought passes through reason: the logic of action and the ethics implicit in discourse. Hayek’s allergy to apriorism therefore cripples his liberalism. He wants a freedom that emerged by accident, not one that must be recognized by intellect.

Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics closes the door Hayek left ajar. Any act of justification presupposes that all participants own themselves and may use their bodies and voices freely. To argue otherwise is self-defeating, because one would be denying in content what one affirms in performance. This insight anchors rights not in cultural history but in the logic of reasoned interaction itself. Rothbard reaches the same destination from another road: through natural law grounded in human nature and purposive action. The human being acts to achieve chosen ends; therefore, he must control scarce resources, including his own body, to act at all. The right to property and self-ownership are not discoveries of evolution but conditions of existence.

Hayek’s refusal to anchor liberty in any such necessity leaves him ethically homeless. He cannot say why coercion (actually, aggressive force as opposed to defensive force) is wrong—only that coercive societies tend to stagnate. But a tyrant who managed to maintain prosperity would, by Hayek’s evolutionary standard, stand vindicated. That is not liberalism; that is adaptive utilitarianism disguised as humility.

II. The Problem with Evolutionary Morality: towards a unified praxeology of moral performativity

Hayek’s anthropology of morals—his narrative that reason emerged only after obedience to inherited rules—reverses the true order of explanation. For him, the tribe that submitted to traditional restraints became capable of civilization, while the tribe that demanded rational justification perished. This is a fascinating conjecture about cultural evolution but irrelevant to the question of justice. If obedience precedes reason, then no act of oppression could be condemned so long as it fostered cohesion. The very capacity to reason would then owe its existence to unreasoned submission.

What Hayek calls “cultural selection” is simply historical happenstance purified of moral judgment. Yet he quietly reintroduces judgment through the back door by declaring that the “Great Society”—commercial, contract-based, and cosmopolitan—is superior. But why superior? If one denies objective ethics, that conclusion has no foundation beyond personal preference or evolutionary success. The Hayekian can never say that liberty is right—only that it worked.

Hoppe’s critique strikes at the root: to claim that ethics evolves is itself an ethical claim. One must already assume that adaptation and survival are desirable. But why should survival of a tradition matter more than consistency with the norms presupposed in argument itself? The Hayekian cannot answer without smuggling in moral universals he denies elsewhere. Thus, his evolutionary account collapses into circularity: moral rules are good because they survived; they survived because they were good at surviving.

Rothbard’s natural law provides the missing backbone (ultimately grounded in Hoppe's argumentation ethics, by focusing on humans' defining nature: argumentation, specially, argumentation about rules or discussing justice and injustice). Human beings, by their rational nature, require liberty to live as rational agents (actions generate property). They are not clay molded by history; they are the acting subjects who create history. The evolutionary model turns actors into artifacts. In Hayek’s world, liberty becomes an emergent property of a process no one controls, not the rightful condition each person deserves by virtue of being a self-owning individual.

III. The Misesian Ground and Hayek’s Defection

Mises built the Austrian system on a hard conceptual rock: the axiom of human action. From that axiom flows the entire logic of the market, the meaning of prices, and the impossibility of socialism. Every proposition in praxeology derives from that starting point; it is deductive and necessary, not empirical. The social order is intelligible precisely because its structure is rooted in purposeful action and private ownership.

Hayek, though trained in the same tradition, drifted toward Wieser’s subjectivism, with its emphasis on knowledge and coordination. In doing so, he diluted the Misesian insight. The problem with socialism, for Mises, is not that it lacks information but that it abolishes property. Without ownership, there can be no genuine prices; without prices, no monetary calculation; without calculation, no rational production. The argument is a syllogism, not a sociology.

Hayek’s celebrated essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” replaced that syllogism with an epistemic metaphor. The market, he says, is a “discovery process” in which prices communicate dispersed information. True enough—but dangerously incomplete. Prices are not messages floating through a network; they are the numerical expressions of entrepreneurs’ appraisals under conditions of private property. An “information” theory of markets turns the entrepreneur into a receiver of signals rather than a creator of valuations.

By shifting the argument from property to knowledge, Hayek transformed an impossibility proof into a complexity problem. What Mises called incalculable Hayek called unknowable. And what cannot be known, perhaps technology can someday approximate. Thus was born the idea of “market socialism,” the dream of planners using computers to simulate prices. The Misesian door to utopian engineering had been closed; Hayek reopened it.

IV. The Category Error: Knowledge vs. Appraisal

To call a price a “signal” is to commit a subtle but lethal error. A signal can be transmitted without understanding. A Morse code operator can send and receive dots and dashes without grasping their content. But an appraisal is not a signal; it is an act of judgment. When a capitalist bids for steel, he is not reading data; he is evaluating future possibilities through monetary calculation. He risks his capital on the expectation that consumers will validate his appraisals later in the market. The market’s function is not to share information but to allocate responsibility.

Hayek’s emphasis on the dispersion of knowledge mistakes the symptom for the cause. Knowledge is dispersed because property is divided. Each actor controls certain resources and thus must decide how best to use them. Prices emerge from these ownership decisions, not from disembodied bits of information. Remove ownership and you remove the structure --structure of responsibility and lowered time preference-- that gives knowledge economic meaning.

Hoppe drives this point home: the problem of socialism is not epistemic but institutional. It is not that planners cannot “know enough,” but that they cannot own enough. Calculation presupposes exchange; exchange presupposes property. Hayek’s epistemological turn derailed the most precise and irrefutable argument the Austrian School ever produced.

V. The Ambiguity of Spontaneous Order

Hayek’s spontaneous order has become a mantra among modern liberals who admire complexity and despise certainty. Yet spontaneity is a neutral term. The black market under tyranny is spontaneous. So is organized crime. Spontaneity alone has no moral valence. What matters is whether the interactions that generate order respect or violate rights.

By treating the “extended order” as the measure of value, Hayek inverts the relation between cause and effect. It is not that spontaneous orders create liberty; liberty creates order. When individuals respect property and contract, the result is coordination without coercion. Hayek’s narrative makes liberty a product of evolution rather than its precondition. The Rothbard–Hoppe framework restores the causal chain to its proper direction: individual rights first, order second.

Moreover, Hayek’s version of spontaneous order tends to sanctify the status quo. Whatever exists and persists seems presumptively good. But unjust laws, monopolistic privileges, and welfare bureaucracies have also “evolved.” The argument from emergence can justify any institution that happens to endure. In this sense, Hayek’s evolutionary liberalism becomes the ideology of the successful state: a theory that explains why domination, once stabilized, must have been necessary.

VI. Coercion Redefined and Liberty Diluted

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek attempts to define coercion as the arbitrary control of one’s environment by another’s will. The intention is noble—to distinguish free order from despotic power—but the definition is disastrously elastic. A monopolist, a landlord, or a skilled surgeon could all be said to “control” others’ options. Hayek’s concept transforms economic scarcity into moral fault.

Rothbard restores the precision that Hayek abandoned. Coercion is the initiation of physical force or the threat thereof against person or property (aggression as opposed to the defensive use of force). Nothing more, nothing less. To conflate scarcity with aggression is to open the door to state interference wherever inequality exists. Hayek’s own language, warning of “coercion through economic circumstances,” grants moral cover to interventionism. In trying to refine liberty, he dissolved it.

The consequence is visible in the modern Welfare State that calls itself Hayekian. Regulation, redistribution, and “social insurance” are justified as corrections to coercive imbalances in bargaining power. What began as a defense of liberty ends as an apology for paternalism.

VII. Popperian Skepticism and Hayek’s Contradiction

Hayek’s alliance with Karl Popper contaminated -so to speak- his social philosophy with scientific fallibilism. In the natural sciences, fallibility is a virtue; in moral philosophy, it is suicide. To declare that “we can never know universal ethics” is to renounce the very possibility of defending liberty. Yet Hayek both says this and proceeds to assert that the market order is objectively superior. The contradiction is glaring. He denies universal ethics in theory while smuggling it back in practice.

Hoppe and Rothbard reject that oscillation. They show that some propositions about human conduct are not empirical hypotheses but necessary truths. One cannot deny self-ownership without performing an act that presupposes it (the ethics of argumentation, without an is/ought divide). One cannot legislate universal coercion without contradiction. The moral structure of liberty is as inescapable as the logical structure of arithmetic. Hayek’s fallibilism blurs that line and thereby weakens the intellectual immune system of liberalism itself.

VIII. The Political Failure: the State as Predator, Not Guardian

Hayek’s constitutionalism leaves untouched the state’s monopoly on law. He hopes to restrain it through procedural rules—demarchy, bicameralism, general laws—but never questions its legitimacy as such. For Rothbard and Hoppe, this is naïve after 3.500 years of recorded economic history. The State is not the custodian of order but its principal violator. To grant it the exclusive power to define and enforce law is to guarantee its corruption (as Rothbard and Hoppe's forerunner Gustave de Molinari would point out, whatever good is being offered, the user/consumer is better served by open competition).

Hoppe’s theory of democracy as “the god that failed” exposes the incentives Hayek ignored. Once law is produced by politicians and funded by taxation, it will serve interest groups, not justice. Evolution does not correct that; it entrenches it --the fittest at some point may be the artificial elites or State-sponsored elites--. In practical terms, the only consistent defense of liberty is the abolition of monopoly law in favor of competitive, contractual jurisdictions. Hayek’s evolutionary model, somehow fixated on macro-order, did not evolve or arrive to such radical decentralization examples that have actually and historically brought exemplary results. Examples: Ancient Greece --1500 independent towns and jurisdictions, producing more geniuses in 200 years than Europe in 2000--, Medieval Ireland, --a stateless kritarchy, with pervasive property rights and legendary cultural flourishing- and the "ancient" competitive private judge system that gave us nothing less than the Roman Law.

Liberty is thus undersold and misrepresented.

IX. Conclusion
Reason, along with Property and Responsibility, Restored: Reclaiming the Moral Foundation of Liberty

Hayek’s greatness was his vision of order without forceful designer. His failure was his distrust of reason itself —once it has evolved to what it is, it must have acquired true usefulness, and the same goes for morals/morality, they must have evolved into further and updated validity—. By mistaking epistemic modesty for moral wisdom, he turned liberalism into anthropology. Rothbard and Hoppe restore it to philosophy (moral and legal philosophy). They remind us that liberty is not a cultural accident but a rational necessity —action qua action (as opposed to animal behavior) creates property and responsibility—.

Economic calculation emerges from moral calculation —a structure of responsibility or structure of property—.

A society of free men does not endure because it “evolves better” --maladaptation or success in a toxic environment that an actor itself poisoned does exist-- but because it is right. Markets coordinate not because they transmit information but because they allow owners to appraise and because moral responsibility is at play. Rights endure not because they survived the past but because they are implied in the very act of speaking and acting in the present, to minimize conflict and allow for lasting peace, creation and cooperation.

Hayek’s world is one of endless adaptation. Rothbard’s and Hoppe’s is one of uncompromising principle. History may change, but the logic of liberty does not. That logic—self-ownership, private property, voluntary exchange—is the immovable axis of civilization. Everything else, including Hayek’s evolutionary admiration for what merely endures, civilizationally revolves around it.

Juan Fernando Carpio, Quito, Nov. 2025

(Translated to Spanish here: https://hoppeano.blogspot.com/2025/11/replica-una-refutacion-de-las-criticas.html)

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Notes

The following notes accompany the main essay section by section.

Notes 1–5 anchor “The Hayekian Error: From Evolutionary Order to Ethical Evasion.”
They document Hayek’s definitions of liberty in The Constitution of Liberty and his evolutionary moral theory in The Fatal Conceit, juxtaposed with Rothbard’s and Hoppe’s apriorist counter-foundations in The Ethics of Liberty and A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. These entries also establish the normative problem that Hayek’s evolutionary ethics cannot justify rights as anything beyond historical accidents.

Notes 6–10 correspond to “The Misesian Ground and Hayek’s Defection.”
They trace Hayek’s epistemic turn from Mises’s praxeological impossibility theorem to the “knowledge problem,” citing Huerta de Soto’s critique, Mises (1920), Hayek (1945), and Kirzner’s transitional reinterpretation of entrepreneurial discovery. An additional citation to Stephan Kinsella, “Knowledge vs. Calculation” (2009), clarifies that Hayek’s so-called “problem of knowledge” was in fact a confusion of categories: the market coordinates through monetary calculation based on property, not through the transmission of disembodied information. The distinction between appraisals and signals introduced there underlies this entire section.

Notes 11–13 support “The Category Error: Knowledge vs. Appraisal.”
They link Hayek’s epistemology in Law, Legislation and Liberty to the wider Austrian methodological debate, using Hoppe’s Economic Science and the Austrian Method to expose the inconsistency of subjectivist fallibilism within praxeology. These notes show that when knowledge is treated as dispersed data rather than as valuation rooted in ownership, the entire logic of economic calculation collapses.

Notes 14–17 align with “Coercion Redefined and Liberty Diluted.”
They document Hayek’s shifting definitions of coercion, Rothbard’s corrective precision in Power and Market, and Block’s defense of voluntary power. To this block is added Walter E. Block’s analysis of Hayek’s concept of coercion, as summarized in Stephan Kinsella, “A Tour Through Walter Block’s Oeuvre” (2024), fn. 48, which demonstrates that Hayek’s elasticity in defining coercion emptied the liberal principle of any clear boundary between state violence and market choice. The section concludes with Hoppe’s demonstration, in Democracy: The God That Failed, that any monopolized legal system inevitably drifts toward politicization.

Notes 18–23 accompany “Popperian Skepticism and Hayek’s Contradiction.”
They show how Popper’s scientific fallibilism migrated into Hayek’s moral philosophy and why Hoppe’s and Rothbard’s rationalist counter-methodology rejects that transfer as incoherent. Here the Popperian epistemology undermines moral certainty, while the apriorist approach restores it by grounding ethics in the logic of human action itself.

Notes 24–33 correspond to “The Ambiguity of Spontaneous Order.”
They include Hayek’s statements on spontaneous order, Mises’s opposing causal realism, and interpretive work by Ebeling, Hülsmann, and others clarifying how Hayek’s concept drifts toward justification of existing institutions. These entries reinforce that spontaneity, absent an ethical criterion, cannot serve as a test of legitimacy—only of persistence.

Notes 34–38 belong to “The Political Failure: State as Predator, Not Guardian.”
These citations ground the critique of Hayek’s constitutionalism in de Jasay, Mises, and Hoppe, emphasizing incentive structures and the logic of monopoly coercion. They contrast procedural restraint with the need for structural abolition of coercive monopolies, demonstrating that constitutional devices cannot neutralize the state’s predatory incentives.

Notes 39–46 reinforce the moral and methodological diagnosis advanced throughout the essay.
They contrast Hayek’s epistemic humility with the logical and ethical certainty of Rothbardian and Hoppean reasoning, showing that relativism inevitably re-imports egalitarian moralism. Added here is a cross-reference to Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Hoppe on Hayek” (2009), which crystallizes this entire critique: Hayek transformed liberalism into anthropology by denying the aprioristic foundation of private property, thereby reducing moral principle to adaptive convention.

Notes 47–50 attach to “Conclusion: Reason Restored.”
They tie the final synthesis of praxeology and ethics to Mises’s Human Action, Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State, and Hoppe’s Economics and Ethics of Private Property, illustrating the unity of economic calculation and moral principle that Hayek’s evolutionary model cannot supply. The closing notes complete the circle: the logic of action, not the flux of evolution, is the ground of liberty.

List of notes

Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), ch. 1–2. Hayek’s definition of liberty as the absence of “arbitrary coercion” already signals the shift from the natural-rights tradition toward a rule-based consequentialism.
Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998 [1982]), 45–49. Rothbard’s reconstruction of natural law contrasts sharply with Hayek’s historical-evolutionary account; for Rothbard, moral knowledge is not inherited but deduced from the conditions of human action.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 131–135. Hoppe demonstrates that property rights cannot be justified by evolutionary success but are presupposed in any argument about justice.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 11–14. Mises’s axiom of action functions as an epistemological ground, not an empirical postulate.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25–29. Hayek attributes the growth of civilization to rule-following before rational comprehension — a thesis directly challenged by the praxeological view.
On this, see Jesús Huerta de Soto, Socialism, Economic Calculation, and Entrepreneurship (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2010), 33–42. De Soto shows that Hayek’s knowledge approach is a derivative and less rigorous restatement of the Misesian impossibility theorem.
Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (1920), in Collectivist Economic Planning, ed. F.A. Hayek (London: Routledge, 1935), 87–130. The argument is logical, not empirical.
Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–530. Here Hayek reframes Mises’s impossibility theorem as a coordination problem rather than a property problem.
Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2004 [1962]), 534–540. Rothbard restores the original praxeological meaning of prices as appraisals, not signals.
Israel M. Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 68–73. Even Kirzner’s later interpretation of entrepreneurial discovery depends on property-based calculation, not merely on dispersed knowledge.
Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1995), 43–46. Hayek’s epistemology is shown to be self-contradictory: he denies rational certainty yet claims to know that reason cannot know.
Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1: Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 22–25. His concept of “spontaneous order” conflates descriptive emergence with normative justification.
Mises, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1985 [1927]), 37–41. Mises grounds liberalism in rational self-interest, not evolutionary adaptation.
Rothbard, Power and Market (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2006 [1970]), 12–18. The conflation of dependence and coercion becomes a pretext for statist interference.
Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 19–21. Hayek’s description of the lone doctor in a village as “coercive” illustrates the slippage from aggression to inequality.
Walter E. Block, Defending the Undefendable (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2008 [1976]), 3–6. Block underscores the moral necessity of distinguishing voluntary power from coercive power.
Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 44–47. The state’s monopoly on law leads necessarily to politicization and confiscation of wealth.
Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Collier Books, 1973), 252–260. Rothbard’s vision of a private-law society is precisely what Hayek’s constitutionalism cannot conceive.
Mises, Bureaucracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 18–20. Hayek’s procedural remedies overlook the institutional incentives that make state restraint impossible.
Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (New York: Free Press, 1955), 83–88. His critique of “constructivist rationalism” becomes inconsistent when extended to ethics.
Hoppe, The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline (Baltimore: Laissez Faire Books, 2012), 122–126. Hoppe interprets Hayek’s evolutionary theory as a disguised utilitarianism.
Rothbard, “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics,” in The Logic of Action One (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1997), 64–72. Rothbard rejects Popperian falsificationism as incompatible with the apodictic certainty of praxeological reasoning.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1945), 231–233. Popper’s influence on Hayek injected moral skepticism under the guise of scientific modesty.
Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 67–70. Hayek explicitly denies the possibility of universal ethics — a statement that undermines his entire defense of the liberal order.
Hoppe, “From the Economics of Laissez Faire to the Ethics of Libertarianism,” in The Ethics of Liberty, ed. Lew Rockwell (Auburn: Mises Institute, 1998), 311–319. Hoppe derives libertarian ethics directly from the structure of rational discourse, leaving no room for Hayek’s evolutionary relativism.
F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 62–64. Even here, his moral argument is consequentialist rather than principled.
Mises, Theory and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 21–25. Evolutionary explanations cannot yield norms; they can only describe how beliefs change.
Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, 73–80. The nonaggression principle follows from human action itself, not from historical success.
Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 78–82. Hayek’s rejection of “social justice” is admirable but undercut by his inability to define coercion consistently.
Richard Ebeling, “The Hayekian Paradox: Rule of Law Without Natural Rights,” The Freeman 44, no. 10 (1994): 543–547. Ebeling notes that Hayek’s rule-of-law framework depends parasitically on the very natural-rights assumptions it disavows.
Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method, 59–62. Hayek’s subjectivism fails to recognize that intersubjective norms arise only through reasoning, not selection.
Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1963), 28–33. The same moral timidity that plagues Hayek’s ethics appears in his macroeconomics: he explains crises descriptively rather than attributing them to state aggression.
Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2007), 618–620. Hülsmann documents Hayek’s early allegiance to Wieser’s “imputation” theory, which subordinated Menger’s causal realism to psychological subjectivism.
Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2008), 14–17. Kinsella illustrates how genuine property theory requires the same deductive clarity missing in Hayek’s evolving conventions.
Joseph Salerno, “The Place of Mises’s Human Action in the Development of Modern Economic Thought,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 2, no. 1 (1999): 35–65. Salerno emphasizes the gulf between Mises’s formalism and Hayek’s epistemology of ignorance.
Anthony de Jasay, The State (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998 [1985]), 21–24. Hayek’s hope that constitutional constraints can neutralize state predation ignores the structural incentives de Jasay identifies.
Mises, Omnipotent Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 113–116. The state’s drive toward intervention is not an aberration but the logical outcome of monopoly on coercion.
Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, 106–109. Evolutionary “selection” of political rules does not favor liberty; it favors organized looting.
Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature (Washington, D.C.: Libertarian Review Press, 1974), 12–15. Evolutionary defenses of liberty inadvertently reintroduce egalitarian moral skepticism through the back door.
Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 357–360. Even sympathetic interpreters concede that Hayek never resolved the contradiction between epistemic humility and moral universality.
Hoppe, A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2015), 91–95. The true “spontaneous order” is not an accidental emergence but the cumulative effect of voluntary contracts and private-law enforcement.
Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, 151–155. The permanence of rights lies in their logical necessity, not in their historical durability.
Mises, Human Action, 716–721. The entrepreneur’s appraisement process is what integrates knowledge into economic coordination, rendering Hayek’s “signal” metaphor superfluous.
F.A. Hayek, The Sensory Order (London: Routledge, 1952), 160–165. Hayek’s epistemology, originally psychological, shaped his later moral relativism: perception, not principle, structures order.
Ludwig Lachmann, The Market as an Economic Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 35–39. Lachmann’s subjectivism deepened Hayek’s indeterminacy; without the Misesian anchor of property, subjectivity devolves into flux.
Hoppe, Property, Causality, and Liability (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2006), 17–22. Ownership is the indispensable causal link between action and responsibility.
Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, 214–220. Evolution cannot substitute for argument; only rational consistency can secure liberty against majority predation.
Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3: The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 107–111. His “demarchy” proposal retains all the coercive machinery of the state under new procedural labels.
Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1993), 183–186. Hoppe’s vision of polycentric law eliminates Hayek’s reliance on monopolistic enforcement.
Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, 1087–1090. The final synthesis of praxeology and ethics shows that order without aggression is logically implied in the nature of action itself.

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From a review of this text:

Eleutheria

sábado, 8 de noviembre de 2025